“El Helicoide: From Mall to Prison” exhibition opening

Visit the AIANY Center for Architecture for the opening of “El Helicoide: From Mall to Prison”. 

Organized in collaboration with PROYECTO HELICOIDE, the exhibition, curated by Celeste Olalquiaga, explores the collapse of El Helicoide de la Roca Tarpeya, once considered a futuristic icon, in Caracas, Venezuela.

Designed in the late 1950s as a state-of-the-art, drive-in mall, El Helicoide eventually fell prey to political and financial disruptions. The project was never completed and went through decades of abandonment, eventually becoming home to more than 10,000 squatters. In 1985, Venezuela’s intelligence police took it over. Since then, the building has been a center of imprisonment and torture.

El Helicoide portrays the conflicts and complexities of Venezuela’s modernizing project. Standing in stark contrast to the grandiose aspirations that fueled its development, the structure epitomizes the dystopian reality of modernist utopian dreams in Latin America.

Exhibition is free and open to the public.

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